City of Villains: Predators and Prey
by Heckfire
Summary: In the bowels of the Ziggursky Prison, an evil older than time is about to be released...


Darkness. Foul and mouldering, as if the light of neither sun nor moon, nor those pitiful buzzing electric devices the humans pride themselves on had never even dared to touch the festering gloom...this had been his world for longer than he'd bother to remember. Those who'd captured him prided themselves on their success, locked him away from the damning eyes of vain Sola, from the gentle, cool caresses of the shieldmaiden, Luna, his mother, locked him in the smothering embrace of the suicidal mother of all, Gaea, in a metal tomb of their own human design. They'd intended him to rot here, much as the traitorous creatures men called "gods" had by stripping him of his true aspect and damning him to this frail mortal shell he now wore.

The Predator wanted to laugh whenever he thought of it.

He was older than time. His heart had begun to beat when that of the first creature to die at another's hands had ceased; their deathrattle had been his birthing wail. He was murder incarnate, fear embodied; his was the shape that lurked just outside the campfire's glow, the hot breath on the back of the dreamer's neck when they fled the unknown darkness of their slumber, his face the first image in a baby's mind when severed from the all-emcompassing embrace of their mother's womb. It was his whisper that drove the hunter to stalk, the killer to slay; it was in his honor men had wielded the first weapon, the memory of his gleaming fangs that inspired man to shape the first blade.

He had outlived stars. This prison was less than a heartbeat's span compared to his lifetime...it was simply a matter of waiting until one who had forgotten why he was here would let him out again.

He could wait until then.

Only once did the endless dark part for him...a visitor to his prison, one of the other Elder Beasts who he'd sired in the past. She'd gone by as many names as he had, but he'd always known her as the Weaver, the Net-Maker, the Trapper. SHe'd always prided herself on her endless patience, born of her ability to allow her prey to place itself within her grasp, so he grudgingly admitted himself surprise at her being the first to come to him.

She walked with the grace of the abstract, unattainable by anything that had ever known life or death, her twice and twice agian count of legs perched carefully upon a myriad realities as she lowered her face to his.

"My poor, poor father..." her voice dripped with a pity as venomous to the Predator as the poison she posessed, but if she noticed the baleful hatred in his eyes she didn't let it show. "It wounds me to see you reduced to such a state...mortal, chained by your prey, denied the sky and the earth to roam...powerless."

"Release me, and you'll see how 'powerless' I am, traitor."

The Weaver smiled within her mandibles, her score of eyes glittering with mirth and...something else? "I do not deny the part I played in your incarceration, nor do I desire your forgiveness."

"I do not forgive. The Wild Hunt...you, the Legless, the Stalker, the Devouring Cloud, the Killing Green, the Unborn...you will all slake my thirst with your blood."

She continued as if he hadn't spoken...his fangs ached to sink into her flesh for the insult. "...I do, however, request your assistance. One who I favor will be in a position to change the natural order in battle with his enemy. This must not happen. I require someone with a more...intimate knowledge of the true nature of this reality to be present to stop this from occurring. You are who I chose."

"I will reshape this world to my whims if the chance presents itself."

"No, you will not." The Weaver lost all pretense of civility, her gleaming fangs millimeters from the Predator's face. "You are bound to this world now. To change its natural order will result in your death as surely as it will everything else."

"So why should I care. Death comes to all things, as I will to you someday, so what does it matter if one mortal dies or if all things material die? It would further my revenge if your favorite destroyed all in your name..."

She could not hide the mocking laughter in her voice at this, nor did she try. "Because...I KNOW you, father. The chance to reshape this reality, to reclaim all the Unwritten Laws have taken from you, to once more strike terror into more than just mortals...it is too tempting a prize for you to allow even the possibility of it to slip past you."

The Predator's hateful silence was all the agreement she needed.

Her skilled hands were working now, pulling the dank darkness around them both from where it hung and re-knitting it with delicate gestures as she spoke. "For now, you will wait here...it's as convenient a place as any. In a day to come, you will be visited by one who has been marked by another from the Hunt but who also bears MY mark. Go with her when the opportunity presents itself...she will take you to where you need to be. Eventually, the time will come when you must do what I ask, but she will be the first step on the path there. Until then, I give you this to keep you safe."

Her hands draped the woven shadows about his massive shoulders; he could feel it seeping into his mortal frame, becoming one with his aspect. In spite of himself, he was curious...

"Goodbye, father. I look forward to our next meeting...maybe you might even pose a threat." She pressed a toxic kiss to his muzzle, searing fur and flesh with her affection, before turning and stepping from the material realm.

The Predator was alone once more. Alone with his thoughts and his plans..._You may be the layer of traps, my treasonous daughter,_ he smiled in the blackness, _but you've made a dire mistake this time, one that will kill you. You've given me a purpose..._

_...and you left me alive. _

"WAKE UP, SCUMWADS! BREAKFAST IN 10, SO GET YOUR SKANKY ASSES IN GEAR!"

The sound of the guard's nightstick clanging across the bars as she stomped past each cell door was only _slightly_ more grating to Dr. Elaine Pipre's nerves than her voice was. She flinched as the light in her cell flashed on, squinting as she groped in her sudden blindness for her glasses. She smiled at the far more satisfying metal against metal sound of her prosthetic hand touching the wire frames of her glasses before lifting them to her face.

As the familiar world of her prison cell came into focus, Elaine swung her legs off the bed, feeling the cold concrete beneath her scaled feet as she scooted to the edge. She stood and stretched, her reptilian tail thrashing reflexively behind her, before she walked to lavatory area for her morning "business."

As she washed her metal hands afterward, she carefully checked herself in the mirror; another bit of morning business, the daily mutation check. _Nope_, she mused in silent relief, releasing the breath she'd been holding, _nothing new this time. A week since the last mutation; it seems the latest changes have finally stabilized, thank God._ It'd become a periodic fact of life since the retrovirus, these sudden and unpredictable reinfections that would alter her body in new and "exciting" ways.

_Never anything useful, though, like superpowers,_ she thought sourly. The closest she'd ever gotten to any real metabilities had been the drastic and painful sharpening of her senses that made wake-up call so much fun and her suddenly sprouting a 3-foot-long prehensile tail, something which made her disturbingly popular with some of the lonlier ladies who shared her incarceration. The latest re-mutation had simply altered her eye color to an odd golden hue, by far one of the less malicious changes to take place..._I mean, seriously,_ she thought while changing her shirt, glancing at the small, featureless swells of her breasts, almost lost among the scaled ridges of her upper torso, _I really miss having nipples sometimes._

Tying her dark lavender hair into its typical ponytail (_Why did it have to turn purple? I HATE purple..!_) and slipping her reptilian feet into the standard-issue shoes, she patiently waited for the cell door to open so she could file along with all the other would-be supervillainesses in the women's wing of "the Zig" to her morning breakfast of powdered eggs, watery orange juice, and petrified toast. _Join Arachnos, watch the world cower at your feet...riiiight. Pull the other one._

Once, she'd been the darling of the intellectual set: while her peers were learning their A, B, C's, she'd been challenging Einstein's Theory of Relativity; when other girls were awaiting their first period, she was accepting her third doctrate degree. Cold, hard facts were her world, her only love...not even the lab accident that had claimed her hands had slowed her pursuit of knowledge, only changed its direction towards robotics as she designed, patented, and utilized a revolutionary new type of prosthetics to replace the lost limbs. iMy first Nobel prize.../ishe smiled at the memory.

Her cold ruthlessness eventually began to tell upon those who tried to work with her. It'd been Robert, one of a disposeable string of one-night-stands in lab coats, who'd first coined her prophetic nickname, "Dr. Vipre." She'd been outraged at the time, of course...Robert was also the first in a series of lab "accidents" that would occasionally occur whenever someone would challenge her theories or her authority in the lab. It was more expedient that way, anyway...filing the paperwork for personnel transfers was SO tedious.

Of course the police eventually caught on...they always DO, the wretches...so it had seemed fortuitous when the lead detective revealed himself to be a Night Widow, an undercover agent for an organization called Arachnos. He'd offered her the perfect scenario: unlimited resources, political support so long as she produced the results she was reknowned for already, unquestioned authority within her lab. She'd accepted in a heartbeat, making Aeon City her home and base of operations...the nickname that'd earned her rare but deadly anger became a badge of honor, as Dr. Vipre became the Head of Experimental Logistics for Arachnos.

_Unquestioned authority..._Elaine mentally sneered as she shuffled along with the lineup towards the cafeteria_...and unrivalled hubris along with it._ Her theories had seemed so sound, and no one had dared to question them upon threat of death or worse. _Maybe if someone HAD, I wouldn't be playing "What's Mutating Today?" in an ultra-maximum security prison full of frustrated, superpowered would-be lesbian rapists..._

She and her labs had been assigned the task of uncovering the origins of the Snakes, a naga-like race that claimed to be the "natural" inhabitants of the Rogue Isles, and a means of harnessing that potential to further Arachnos' ends. Dissection of specimens, living and dead, had revealed astonishing similarities between them and humanity, including evidence that they had once possessed legs...surely, this meant that something had turned humans into the Snakes. She was certain she could replicate the effect, even enhance it, but those few human test subjects who survived were turned into something more akin to beasts, their higher mammalian intellect atrophied, leaving only the baser, reptilian brain functions.

She was convinced that a sufficiently advanced intellect could resist the effects and tap into the power WITHOUT surrendering their humanity...and, truly, whose intellect was more advanced than her own? Against the repeated warnings of her superiors in rank, she injected herself with the mutagenic retrovirus she'd used on the others, changing herself into the living embodiment of her working name. Driven mad by the process, however, she'd unleashed the surviving test subjects on an unsuspecting Aeon City, slaughtering scores of humans before she'd finally been brought down by psionic assault, a mental slap across her face that restored her sanity just in time to face the wrath of her former benefactors.

For some reason, however, her fate had not been sealed then; instead, she was turned over to American authorities, along with enough evidence of her past crimes against Robert and others to convict her of multiple 1st Degree murders. The trial of Dr. Vipre hadn't been a media circus, it had barely managed cover page in most cities; her sentencing to the Zig instead of the death penalty due to her past accomplishments and reputation hadn't even raised an eybrow. It was worse than death.

She was forgotten.

_So, here I rot,_ Elaine ruminated as she listlessly poked at her "eggs," _forbidden to even take my own life due to those damn medical teleporters, forced to watch my greatest mistake unfold in bits and pieces each time I look in the mirror. A single bullet, that's all it would've taken, but NO...if I ever find that psionic bitch that struck me down..._

Her dark thoughts were interrupted as her tray was yanked out from in front of her. She started, staring up into the massive, obsidian face of Luster, a brutish stone-skinned female who'd typically sat across from her.

"You ain't eatin' it, bitch," Luster snarled defensively, her low voice like a cement mixer attempting to purr. "So it's a delivery fee now." She unceremoniously tossed her own tray in front of Elaine before beginning to shovel the runny yellow slop into her distorted rocky maw.

Elaine couldn't even muster up any anger when Luster's words finally hit her. Glancing down at the tray, she saw that the yellow fluid that'd passed for egg yolks had collected in a series of scratches at the bottom of the tray. Nudging it a few times to get more yolk-juice into the scratches, she was able to make out something...

Two words: BE READY.

And a crude image of a spider.

Elaine could feel the chill running up and down her spine for long after the alarms in the cafeteria began to sound.

The first expolsions rocked the Ziggurat at approximately 6:50am...Mr. Greene peered at his watch with distaste, "tsk"-ing to himself. _Ten minutes too soon...someone's head will doubtlessly roll tonight, I'm certain._

Smoothing out his orange prison suit, he stood and dusted the smaller pieces of debris from his shoulders, then sauntered over the the iron door of his cell and rapped smartly on it, heedless of the sound being drowned out by the chaos outside. "Pardon me, sirs," he spoke to the cell door at a pleasant, conversational, and all-too-apparently-useless volume, "might I trouble someone to release me from my cell? Now, I KNOW this would seem contra-positive to my intended sentence of, how did the judge phrase it, being 'locked away in the deepest, darkest hole you can find until Judgement Day,' but, as it DOES appear to be said timeframe, might I think it's safe to presume my stay here at your LOVELY facility has concluded?"

He listened intently, his hand cupped to the door, but when nothing responded to his inquiry but the rumbling of further explosions and the blare of klaxons, both muffled by the 3 inches of reinforced steel plating between him and the hallway outside, he stepped back from it, crossing his stick-thin arms and rubbing his chin thoughtfully. "Dear me, it DOES appear that I have been, in this dreadful din, left to my own devices in this time of crisis."

Slowly, his lips peeled back from his perfectly white and smooth teeth in a broad smile. Pulled back...and back...and yet further back...until it reached past the edges of the mossy scraglike hair that drooped down over where a pair of ears would normally be expected to reside, a horrific caricature made all the more grotesque by the utter lack of any additional features upon the green expance of his face to accompany it.

"Simply marvelous."

He crouched down, his froglike digitigrade legs folding beneath him, and rubbed his fingertips together in anticipation. As he did, the woodlike, brownish claws on his thumbs seemed to lengthen and thicken, bulging from their nailbeds. Without a moment of hesitation or thought, he stuck his thumbs into his mouth, biting down on the distended nails and ripping them unceremoniously off.

At the first sighting of light beneath the door from the explosions that rocked the building, he spat the rounded nail stumps under it. It took a couple of tries, before he succeeded; after exhausting the two thumbnails, he proceeded to pull the talons from each successive finger until he'd finally gotten one under it.

Mr. Greene stood up, satisfied, and dusted himself off again. With another skull-halving smile, he undid his fly. "Now, to water it...goodness, it feels like I've been holding THIS in for years. Wait, I HAVE been, haven't I..?"

The stream of liquid puddled at the door, slowly seeping under it and surrounding the nail wedged beneath it. The gnarled surface of the nail began to soak the foul fluid in, expanding until the nail had become twice its previous size. The now-smooth surface trembled faintly as the first of several bulges appeared.

Mr. Greene zipped up, stepping back from the metal door.

To anyone outside the subteranean section of the Zig reserved for those criminals too dangerous and powerful to ever consider releasing again, the sound was indistinguishable from any of the other explosions. Had anyone actually still been observing it, though, they'd have seen the iron door labelled "GREENE, MISTER" suddenly buckle as it was wrenched deafeningly from its frame by the impossibly swift appearance of a twisted black mass of thorny vines. They continued to spiral forth, wrapping over the hallway walls before, with equal swiftness, they rapidly withered and crumbled to twitching pieces on the floor.

Mr. Greene stepped delicately from the cell that had housed him for almost twenty years, pausing to affecionately pat the largest remaining piece of the now-dead thornbush before striding purposefully off towards the heart of the explosive chaos.

The sleek black craft sailed in low over the riotting prisoners. They didn't look real to the overwhelmed prison guards at first, but as lances of crimson energy began to cut through felon and guard alike, their deadly reality was assured. Clearing a makeshift landing area of living persons in the main courtyard, the craft decended, their hatches hissing open and disgorging waves of tendrilled robots who began to swarm through the remaining riotters.

Once the bulk of humanity had been either slain or automatically teleported to the rapidly overflowing medical wing, black-and-red-armored soldiers emerged and, with trained proficiency, secured the area before fanning out, several carrying large cannister-like devices. By the time the first explosions erupted throughout the Zig, the landing site of the invaders was the only area of the super-prison not firmly in the grip of panicked chaos.

Dr. Vipre watched this all from the cafeteria window. She didn't dare to believe her eyes; twice already she'd compulsively removed her glasses and cleaned them to make sure she wasn't seeing things. There was no mistaking the blood-hued symbol on each soldier, robot, and craft, though, especially considering she'd worn it herself once before, a seeming lifetime ago.

It was Arachnos.

Dazed, Elaine turned from the window back towards the ongoing melee behind her. Upon the first sounding of the prison alarms, many of the burlier of her fellow inmates had lunged into action, moving too quickly and uniformly for it to have been a random reaction. Luster had been one of them, uprooting the breakfast table and hurling it at one of the clusters of startled guards. Elaine had narrowly avoided being used as a makeshift projectile herself, quickly retreating to the window and cowering against the wall, but the inmates on either side of her hadn't been so lucky before Luster had finally charged the next nearby group of guards.

Things hadn't changed much, although, the crowd had been thinned out considerably; injured personnel and inmates were still shimmering from sight as the medical teleporters yanked fallen combatants from the field almost as fast as they fell. Luster was no where to be seen, though, having either fallen or moved on, so Elaine had no way to ask her for any information about what the Hell was going on.

_What am I thinking, I already KNOW what's going on: for some reason, Arachnos is staging the largest and deadliest prison break in history._ She quickly surveyed the ruins of the cafeteria for a clear exit.

"Dr. Vipre! Over here!" Elaine turned towards the voice; a blonde guard was waving to her from the least obstructed doorway. Deciding quickly, she sprinted for it, dodging bodies and combatants while clutching her precious glasses to her face with a free hand. She got knocked off her feet twice and gutpunched hard by another guard barely a dozen yards from the exit. AS she crumpled, breathless, the crack of a pistol quickly sent her confused attacker to the medical ward and a pair of strong hands lifted her to her feet. Elaine couldn't speak either thanks or protest before she was roughly shouldered into a fireman's carry and rushed out the door.

Lights flashed behind her eyes and she blacked out twice during the run; she was vaguely aware of her rescuer carrying her down a flight of stairs (or was it two?) at one point, but she wasn't sure of when her glasses had fallen off. Finally, though, she recovered enough to croak out, "Put me down, I'm okay..."

The blonde guard nodded rapidly, then ducked around the nearest corner away from the ruckus. She carefully lowered Elaine to the ground, then stood up and stretched her back before leaning against the wall, panting for breath.

"Thank you," Elaine watched her rescuer carefully, squinting, then ventured cautiously, "You work for Arachnos, don't you?"

The blonde nodded, then straightened. "I'm a plant. There are about 40 of us here, guards and prisoners, who were supposed to organize this breakout."

"But, why..?"

The blonde snorted. "The Americans don't even realize what they did, putting all of their most dangerous metacriminals together in one place...it's like an Arachnos recruitment drive smorgasborg. Lord Recluse has been planning this for years...it was just a matter of timing, I guess."

"But...why, me? I mean, I thought, after what I did..."

Elaine wasn't sure if the blonde guard's expression changed, but something about her tone sounded...different. "Arachnos recognizes your genius, Dr. Vipre. They wouldn't waste a resource like that, despite your past crimes. They needed to teach you a lesson, though, a lesson about betraying us...it's one I hope wasn't lost on you."

Elaine shook her head, pulling a lock of hair from her eyes. "No...not a day has passed where I didn't realize exactly what I did, why I was here. I'm just glad...just so glad it's over, finally over." Tears of relief and adrenalin let-down dribbled down her green-gold scaled cheeks, but she didn't care..."I was so sure I'd been forgotten here, it's been so long..."

"You weren't forgotten, Dr. Vipre. There's no way you could be foprgotten." Something about the guard's words didn't sound right, but Elaine was to shaken by the events of the morning to do anything more than file it in the back of her head. "If you can run, we still have a ways to go before it's over." At Elaine's nod, the guard stood and took her metal hand. "Good...c'mon, we've gotta go this way."

Mr. Greene watched the two women, guard and snake-like prisoner, talk from the shadows...he'd been tempted to see if his skills were still as "sharp" as they'd been before his incarceration, but after hearing the guard 's admission of being an Arachnos agent, he decided against it. _No sense in upsetting the new bosses, ESPECIALLY after they'd gone to SO much trouble on my behalf..._

Still, as he watched the pair run off, he couldn't help but wonder. After all, the pale woman who'd appeared in his cell had given precice directions to where the pick-ups were taking place, beamed them directly into his brain, in fact.

_...so why, in Heaven's name,_ he puzzled as he turned and headed towards the courtyard, _are they going back down the passageway I just left..?_

Elaine wasn't all that sure when she first realized something wasn't right. With her glasses gone, she had no choice but to rely on her rescuer to guide her through emergency-lit hallways and down metal steps, but it eventually began to dawn on her that, even with her heightened senses, the sounds of the explosions and riotting should probably be getting louder in the direction they were supposed to be going.

She stopped then, pulling her arm free of the guard's grip. "Where are you taking me? Who are you?"

The blonde guard turned; even with her blurred sight, Elaine couldn't mistake the glare of cold hatred that the woman wore, or the gun she now pointed at her. "My name is Agent Sparman. Sound familiar?" At Elaine's blank stare, Agent Sparman continued, "I didn't think it would. People mean nothing to you, do they? Everyone is just a resource to you, expendable and replaceable. Just like my dad was...remember him yet? You turned him into one of your damn snake-monsters, then set him loose to kill for you when you tried to take over Aeon City...it never occurred to you that he'd remember, remember enough about his old life to know where to find us, his wife and his daughter. Heh...of course, he didn't remember WHO we were, other than warm meat for a hungry monster. He ripped my mother, his WIFE, to pieces and ATE her, right in front of me...and when he was done with her, he came for ME. I still have the scars, too, where he took a bite out of my side before the Wolf Spiders were able to bring him down. And you know what? HE CHANGED BACK WHEN HE DIED...didn't know your treatment did that, huh? I saw him turn back into my dad, dead on the floor, with a PIECE OF MY FRIGGIN' INTESTINES STILL HANGING FROM HIS MOUTH. Nice, huh? What a HAPPY childhood memory, huh?"

Elaine's face had gone grey. She felt lightheaded, all she could do was shake her head slowly and moan, softly, "No, please, no, I'm sorry, please..."

"SHUT UP!" Sparman's ragged voice almost seemed to drown out the gunshot she fired into the wall by Elaine's head; she was either a skilled markswoman or she missed her shot, because Elaine could feel the searing heat of the bullet's passing barely a millimeter from her ear. "SHUT THE HELL UP! It took YEARS to work my way up through Arachnos, and when I learned about this breakout, I knew it was my only chance to get to you, to make you PAY for my life and my mom and my dad. You don't know what I did, what I had to do to get into this position, to get to where YOU were, so I could FINALLY bring you down...you know what, though? You're not even the same THING you were...I've watched you for weeks, seen what a SPINELESS, WEAK little piece of TRASH you've become. Killing you, here, like this? I'd be doing you a FAVOR, God DAMN you...no, I won't get anything from helping you. I want you to SUFFER...that's why I brought you down here. Down here to the Pit...this is where they put the worst of you, the monsters that have to be locked away forever. They don't even have a Med-Evac telepport linkage here...too easy for one of these THINGS to wound themselves, get flashed to the med-wing, and tear themselves out of the place. No...things are put here to DIE, just like you will. Slowly. Piece by piece, just like my mom did. SHe was still alive when he started eating, you know that? I heard her screaming to GOD while he shoved HUNKS of her into his MOUTH...and I want to hear YOU do the same."

Elaine had been backing away from the crazed guard, not even aware of which way she was going until she stumbled over the twisted, bent remains of one of the huge steel doors she'd been edging past. She cast a quick look for the cell it belonged to...this time, Sparman's shot didn't miss, ripping deep into Elaine's left thigh.

With a scream, the doctor fell to the ground, clutching her leg and sobbing as Sparman continued to advance slowly, her laugh as twisted as the door Elaine was scooting feebly from. "See? No shimmer, no 'POOF!' to the medbays...just you, me, my gun, and the worst creatures to ever walk this planet. Now, which one do I feed you to?"

Idly, as she walked, she'd glance casually at the names on the doors they passed, her gun never wavering from where it kept Elaine pinned. "The Bludwyrm? Oooh, that sounds fun...oh, but it might just suck your blood or make you a vampire, can't have THAT now. The Baltimore Ripper, I remember reading about him...hmm, no, aside from being immortal, he's just a normal, skinny human. I want you torn apart, not talked to death...ah, here we are...Karnifex. Y'know, he was the Pit's first? Been here since the late 40's, back when this was still just a regular prison...Hell, he's the reason the Pit area was first comissioned. I checked, too...motion and medical sensors indicated he's still alive and kicking, heartbeat as strong as it was when he was ripping planes and capes out of the skies over Nazi Germany. OLD SCHOOL monster, here, probably hungry as Hell, too..."

Sparman chrouched right near Elaine, pressing her pistol to the doctor's temple as she whispered, with a chuckle, "Actually, I'd always intended for you to be his. I just like fucking with your head, bitch."

With a harsh laugh, she yanked Elaine painfully to her feet and slammed her against the wall next to the last door in the hall. Over eight feet tall and almost as wide, it was covered with a faint layer of rust and etched with symbols that she couldn't make out clearly.

She COULD, however, vaguely make out a large, electronic lock, obviously far newer and in better condition than the door it was attatched to, embedded into the door's surface. Sparman reached into a pouch on her belt and pulled out a small black box that looked slightly like a TV remote; she jabbed the box into an unseen slot in the lock and pressed several buttons on it. While her tormentor was busy with this, Elaine briefly considered running, but, almost as if she could read the doctor's thoughts, Sparman lowered the gun and, without even looking up, shot Elaine's uninjured foot.

There was a loud, rumbling clank that echoed down the hall and the etchings on the door seemed to shimmer for a second, then it hissed as its internal hydraulics released. The sound of Sparman pulling the door open screeched and howled like a beast itself as hinges older than both women's fathers moved for the first time in over half a century.

Sparman grunted with the exertion, then, holstering her pistol, grabbed the sobbing, injured Elaine by the collar and shoved her roughly through the narrow opening. Working quickly, she then threw her body against the door and shoved it closed; she smiled as the automatic hydralics sealed it again without incident.

Agent Sparman stepped back from the huge door, absently dusting decades-old rust from her guard's uniform as she smiled, her eyes gleaming with demented glee.

"Goodbye, Dr. Vipre. Have fun in Hell, okay?"

Blood. Rich and fresh, tinged faintly with the scent of gunpowder and lead...in spite of himself, the Predator felt his stomach rumble, felt the saliva pooling within his jaws. He inhaled again, savoring the smells; sweet fear, sweat, and that wonderful, overpowering BLOOD...he growled in anticipation as he opened his eyes.

Elaine had tried to crawl to the massive door, her metal hands scraping for purchase on the smooth stone floor when she heard the sound. She looked around frantically, but not even her serpentine senses could make out any details other than a low, thrumming growl.

The Predator lifted himself from where he'd crouched for so many decades, slowly beginning to circle this intruder in his cell as his senses filled him with information. _Female, humanoid...no forelimbs? No, metal ones, and I smell old scars there...a tail? Unusual...she's wounded, lamed, two gunshot wounds...human, but the tail and that familiar scent...reptile?_

His eyes widened, then narrowed again as he rcognized the scent..._No, not reptile. Serpent. Snake. One of the Legless' kind._

He started to lower himself to pounce when a memory, distant but still fresh, clawed its way through his primal instincts and forced itself into his higher forebrain. A memory of the Weaver and her words: _"...you will be visited by one who has been marked by another from the Hunt but who also bears MY mark..."_

Despite the gnawing hunger in his belly and the cloying scents of his prey, he forced himself down, pushing his instincts back as he drew closer towards the snake woman.

Elaine knew the creature was drawing closer, she could hear his slow, even breath growing nearer to her even as she remained frozen in her crouch on her hands and knees. It slowly dawned on her that its growling, so certainly a sign of the violent demise Agent Sparman had condemned her to, slowly faded.

She heard the beast draw in a long breath before, in a voice that, despite its low thrum of menace and nightmarish inhumanity, sounded as unused and rusty as the cell door, it spoke: "Who...are...you..?"

She swallowed hard, struggling to find her own voice. "I-I-I'm, I'm Elaine, D-Dr. Pipre, uh, Dr. Vipre, o-of Ar-of Arachnos."

She couldn't see the sudden widening of the Predator's eyes, but his derisive snort almost flattened her. "You lie. You are not of this...'Arachnos.' You are prey."

"NO!" Panic flashed through Elaine's mind, burning away all terror and pain as she spoke quickly. "I AM...I was, I mean. I was sent here by them, years ago...they're af-afraid-d of m-me, so they s-sent me here, like you, a-and shot me, so I couldn't escape."

Another snort. "You still lie. Some of your words hold truth...make them all do so."

"IT'S TRUE...s-sort of. I h-hurt them, so they punished me...they came back, but one of them g-gave me, uhm..."

"...gave you to me. To kill."

Elaine's mouth went dry; even as she worked her jaw, she couldn't force any words out.

"Your silence is damning, snake-woman. It is truth, though. This...Arachnos has returned. Good...my time here is finally ended." He lowered his face to hers, smiling in the darkness as he saw her flinch from his breath. "You will take me to Arachnos, snake-woman. THAT is why you are here now."

Elaine blinked, uncomprehending for several heartbeats. " I, uhm, I will?"

The Predator raised himself up, cricling around her again. "Yes, or you will feed me. Your choice." He lowered himself to her other ear. "Choose...correctly." Elaine nodded quickly in agreement and he chuckled, a mirthless, mocking sound. "Good. I have...need...of a servant. The world is different, I presume...you will guide me through it, snake-woman. You will not lie or you will be prey again. Tell me your name...your REAL name."

Elaine started to speak, then a slow realization occurred to her...her REAL name.

"Dr. Vipre."

The Predator nodded as he moved behind her, his breath hot on her neck. "What is MY name, Dr. Vipre..?"

She swallowed, still not daring to move. "Karnifex...LORD Karnifex."

He nodded again as his talons found the waistband of her blood-stained slacks; she felt them rasp across her scaled hips as the fabric was rent from her body. Instinctively, she curled her tail about her backside, a whimper of fear escaping her as she felt his taloned hands grasp her thighs and pull them slowly apart. "Yes. You belong to me now, Dr. Vipre." He opened his massive fanged maw, closing it around her skull; she began to sob silently as she heard his voice again, this time in her head. "Lift your tail, or I close my jaws and you fill my belly." At her hesitation, he clenched his teeth slightly. She could feel the blood from where they pierced the sides of her face trickling down to mingle with the tears she couldn't stop crying. Slowly, she raised her tail, feeling it brush against the creature's fur even as he pulled her hips back towards the blast-furnace-like heat she could feel behind her.

Her voice shaking uncontrollably, she could barely whisper around her choking, silent sobs, "I...am yours...L-Lord Karnifex."

"Yes. You are."

Agent Sparman waited patiently outside the metal door for several minutes, waiting for some sound. She was almost ready to open the door and check inside when she heard the sound of footsteps approaching from behind her a ways. She mentally pulled her "professional" face on before she turned from the door.

Several armored Arachnos troopers entered the hallway, raising their weapons briefly before their helmet displays registered her as one of them. AS they began to fan out and check the names on the doors, the one in the lead walked forward to her. "Agent Sparman, what are you doing here? Your position is discharged, you were supposed to have left with the first wave of prisoners."

Before she could answer, a woman's scream echoed from behind the door behind her, shocking all the Arachnos soldiers into defensive positions, their mace-rifles aimed at the massive metal portal. It was a scream many had never heard before and it chilled their blood; even their commander seemed shaken.

He recovered quickly enough to notice the only one not affected as Agent Sparman stood, a satisfied smile on her face. He lept back to his feet and stood inches from her face. "WHat the Hell is going on, Agent Sparman? ANSWER ME."

She simply stared at him with a smug, slightly dazed look on her face. "Revenge, Captain. Finally."

He angrilly grabbed her and threw her towards two other guards. "Hold her...the rest of you, be ready for whatever-"

His words were cut off by the deafening screech of the huge door suddenly smashing open from the inside; the Captain himself was struck in the shoulder, spinning him hard against the wall. He was still aware enough, despite the pain of his shattered arm, to see what happened next.

For long moments, a stunned silence fell over the hallway as the huge door hung crazily from its remaining hinge. Those far enough away to recover their hearing first noticed a sound rumbling from the cell...a growl, like some beast. Agent Sparman looked towards the open portal, hoping to catch some glimpse of Dr. Vipre's remains...

Instead, she saw a pair of yellow, inhuman eyes lock onto hers; a growling, amused voice suddenly sounded in her ears and mind.

"Hello, prey."

A black shape bigger than any of the Arachnos soldiers lunged from the cell, its shape a black blur of motion, clearing the distance between the doorway and Agent Sparman in a single leap. The guards holding her were knocked aside by the huge body; the last sight they registered was Sparman opening her mouth to scream only to be engulfed in fangs and shadows. There was a sickening crunch as the creature wrenched its head back, spraying black and crimson across the walls even as its momentum carried it and its now-decapitated victim down the hallway, cracking off the doorframe of the abandoned cell of Mr. Green and leaping inside.

The shaken soldiers were still professionals, though, and recovered quickly; the two closest to their Captain rushed to his aid while the remainder took up cover position on the cell the black shape had lunged into.

The tearing, chewing sounds and the bestial snarling left no question as to what was going on in the darkened cell.

The Arachnos Captain stood and, flanked by his two aides, walked cautiously towards the cell the creature had vacated. The helmet H.U.D. immediately clicked over to nightvision, revealing a crumpled, female form lying in the center of the floor; the identity display marked it as "Dr. Vipre."

"LEAVE HER ALONE!" The inhuman roar bellowed from the other open cell.

A second later, the dark shape re-emerged into the hallway, this time standing upright on its hind legs, the darkness that had shrouded it rolling from its massive frame like smoke. It walked hunched forward, unable to straighten up due to its height; in one of its massive, hand-like forepaws it held the slender ankle of Agent Sparman, dragging her body alongside him.

The lower half of her body, at least.

"I am Karnifex," the wolf-like beast snarled as he walked towards the Captain, the spikes on his neck and shoulders dragging furrows into the ceiling. "I will accompany you. She-" he gestured to the unmoving form of Dr. Vipre, "-is mine. She will accompany me."

Heedless of the Captain's response, Karnifex re-entered the cell that had held him and, almost disdainfully, tossed the half-corpse to Dr. Vipre, who barely lifted her head to look at it.

"Clothe yourself. We are going to Arachnos."


End file.
